Netflix drops new Black Mirror season 4 trailer, but we still don't know a release date

It’s edging ever closer, but we still don’t know when Black Mirror season 4 will hit Netflix.

With the new season on the horizon, a brand new trailer has dropped online for the upcoming instalments of the award-winning sci-fi series.

The trailer for Arkangel does what Black Mirror does best: addresses key social issues while slipping in a largely believable sci-fi twist; whether it’s set in the near future or through the use of its characters or advanced technology — anyone up for some brain-scrambling, murderous VR horror?

In the first episode, the story is set around the mother of a missing girl, Sarah, who is promptly found and taken to a strange and sinister-looking facility in the aftermath.

‘The key to good parenting is control’ reads the ominous tagline in the promo; as we see the child taken into some sort of behavioural therapy facility to be injected with what is presumably mind control serum. No doubt it’ll culminate in a world overran by chemically controlled children that cannot think and function without adult direction and supervision. That theory may be wrong, but that’s the beauty of Black Mirror — it throws the unexpected your way.

Having won a couple of Emmys earlier this year for season 3’s superb San Junipero, it’s fair to say that Black Mirror is one of the most inventive, on the nose, and engaging shows out there. Sweep to one side your Stranger Things and Game of Thrones obsessions, because the rich social commentary, sci-fi and reality blend of drama, horror, and fantasy makes for fascinating television.

With tales that are so varied and self-contained from episode to episode, it offers something wholly unique with each hour-long story it tells.

Written and created by Charlie Brooker, episode 1 of the new season is directed by none other than Jodie Foster, and is set up to be a pretty enticing piece of horror fiction.

The trailer narrative feels pretty standard once a bloke in his late 60s claims to be over 2,000 years old, leading us to question when and where this is set and what the heck is going on when face needles and mind control is introduced. Things predictably take a sinister turn, but that’s why we tune into the show in the first place, right?

But what the trailer fails to reveal is when season 4 is actually coming out, and it seemed to annoy a lot of people who’d gotten way too excited about on social media and begged to know when it was out.